If Brendan Eich Isn’t Safe…

What you may not know, as someone not in the tech industry, is that Eich is not just some suit who has done some engineering. He is credited as literally the inventor of the JavaScript programming language. This is the scripting language that more or less operates the browser and allows a web page to interact with the user as opposed to be a static display. You might think that would be pretty relevant for the CEO of a freaking browser company. But apparently not as important as the fact that the guy had the same opinion on SSM as Barack Obama in 2008.

That’s what makes this thing so chilling. JavaScript is the world’s most widely used programming language. He invented it! And he also works for a company, Mozilla, that has a policy of keeping out of the office anything (like, say, campaign donations) that doesn’t directly affect the company’s mission — a policy that he had pledged to abide by as CEO. And still, they wouldn’t tolerate him.

If they can knock off a guy like Eich, one of the co-founders of the company and one of the most important figures in the tech industry, because of his belief in traditional marriage, who is safe? I’ve not read anything about Eich’s religious beliefs, but he does have five children, and graduated from Santa Clara University, which is Catholic. Whatever his faith, if he has faith, this is a clear shot that no orthodox Catholic, Evangelical, or Orthodox Christian, or Orthodox Jew, or faithful Muslim, is welcome at Mozilla — nor, it is safe to assume, in Silicon Valley at all. This, even though one’s view on marriage has nothing to do with the success or failure of the work of Silicon Valley. They would rather throw one of the founding fathers of the Internet down a well than tolerate him, because of his expressed belief on traditional marriage.

Think about that.

If this was the Democratic Party, or a gay-rights religious group, an AIDS charity, or an organization like that, you could certainly see why this would, or could, matter to the mission. But a tech firm, especially given that as CEO, he had pledged to abide by and to continue the firm’s gay-friendly policies?

Chilling.

A friend who lives in the Bay Area tells me that he expects gay activist groups to go after insufficiently pro-gay churches indirectly: by targeting prominent businessmen and executives who attend those churches, and threatening pressure on their businesses if they don’t stop going to or donating to those churches.

Maybe. If they can take down a giant in his field like Brendan Eich over this, why should they stop? Error has no rights. They will tell you that there’s a difference between holding an opinion and donating money to a political campaign (otherwise known as “expressing it”). They will tell you that he’s a CEO, and we shouldn’t feel sorry for CEOs; anyway, you’re not a CEO, so don’t worry. Don’t you believe it. It is not enough to agree to live by a company’s gay-friendly policies. If you work there and are known not to support same-sex marriage, you will likely be subject to targeting in the workplace by people who claim your presence makes them feel “unsafe,” or “triggers” their fear. You may be committed to treating all your co-workers, gay and straight, justly and respectfully; it will not matter. If you think it can’t happen to you, ask yourself: if it can happen to someone like Brendan Eich, why couldn’t it happen to me?

I would support a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, protecting gay and lesbian employees from being fired over their sexual orientation. I say “a version,” because I would want strong, clear carve-outs for companies and organizations for whom the sexuality of the employee is directly related to the organization’s ability to carry out its mission. (Similarly, I would want a group like the Metropolitan Community Church or the Human Rights Campaign to be able to dismiss an employee whose stated views against same-sex marriage directly affected their missions. The point is, I believe it’s wrong to fire an employee simply because he or she is gay or lesbian, and as long as a few conditions are met, should be illegal. We could have a federal labor law protecting the right of employees to off-the-job political speech, but that wouldn’t protect any employee from the force of boycotts and witch-hunting. Remember, the Hollywood blacklist was not imposed by the government, but by studio heads. This is about culture.

The Law Of Merited Impossibility — “It’s not going to happen, and when it does, you people will deserve it” — is manifest in the Brendan Eich case to an extent we’ve not yet seen. As far as I can tell, the only real hope orthodox Christians and other opponents of SSM have lies in the willingness of prominent liberal (in the philosophical sense) gays like Andrew Sullivan to stand up for the principle of free speech and tolerance against the McCarthyites. Because when it comes to gay rights in 2014 America, this seems to be true.

UPDATE: William Saletan says you can find out the names of everyone who gave to the Prop 8 campaign, and (sarcastically) urges anti-Eich campaigners to go after them too. He doesn’t mean it, of course; he’s making a point about witch-hunting. If you are one of those corporate executives who gave to Prop 8, I bet you don’t think this is funny today.

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111 Responses to If Brendan Eich Isn’t Safe…

” There are tons of foreign workers at tech companies. This means visa issues if a company goes under or has layoffs. Tech companies go under/have layoffs a lot. So someone who is gay and without a visa and wants to get married to their partner but kept from doing so by Prop 8 is really screwed.”

Yeah, those dudes from Pakistan and India are really into ‘gay’ marriage.

I mostly agree with M_Young that the invention of modern computers was a team effort. With the work of one person building off another’s. John von Neumann for example was a giant in many fields in the mid 20th century, and the design of modern computer architectures is named after him.

Where we disagree is that I found both Alonzo Church and Alan Turing pretty opaque to read. My head was spinning for an entire semester when I took “Automata and Finite State Machines”. I’m reasonably intelligent, but it was pretty obvious that they were both much smarter than me.

Alan Turing was certainly important, and his application of automated computation to cryptanalysis during World War II was impressive stuff. The Nazis didn’t even think breaking the Enigma was possible and had no clue that it was broken.

M. Young says “Turing’s concepts were developed, independently and in a much more durable/usable from, by Alonzo Church,… ”

This is juat completely untrue. The von Neumann digital architecture on which actual computers are based is just a Turing machine with a limited alphabet consisting only of zeros and ones. Additionally, Turing invented the idea of an interpreter that runs a computer program, which he called a universal machine. Programs of course are really the things that make computers different from just being fast abacuses.

Church’s formalism of recursive functions can be proved to work just as well to define computation, but this version is only ever used in abstract theoretical computer science and in a few exotic programming languages like Lisp. It’s mainly because Church was an American professor with some very good students that his version is known at all by people who aren’t studying theoretical computer science or mathematical philosophy.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with anybody’s sexual orientation or religion — both of these guys were outstanding mathematicians. But there is a perfectly good reason why Turing is better known outside of the purely scientific community that has nothing to do with his life’s sad ending.

“And ultimately: this was not an opinion poll Eich participated in. This was legal enshrinement of a principle at stake. It DID have an impact on the street. If you’re going to insist otherwise you misunderstand things.”

The only impact on the street was to acknowledge that two men or two women do not occupy the same space when it comes to marriage. They are two different conditions for the purpose of taxes and benefits. And it did so for very obvious reasons.

It did not actively do anything to the nature of the relationship aside from acknowledge that which was the general understanding. That’s it. Tom and Tom cannot have tax and other benefits reserved for heterosexual unions. I think Prop merely restated what was already the case, to protect marriage from becoming nonunique component of community.

I think as a social construct the people of CA have every right to define relationships based on factors what such relationships provide.

Homosexual unions bring absolutely nothing to the table that would justify the same breaks – nothing. If one prefers the term ‘deserve’ — Then they don’t deserve to have legalized marriages. There is nothing about them that protects or adds to community any more than single people.

” . . . when gay Richard Grenell resigned from Mitt Romney’s campaign staff under pressure from outraged politically active Christianists, Rod was critical of that situation as well. Now, he only called those headhunting people jerkwads as opposed to McCartyites, but his position was consistent.”

The problem here is the same as the references to whether one should hire someone for a “Church” position. You are talking about the a position in which ideology is the key factor. It’s part of the performance — so it rests in another category. It is not the same as a skill set in developing computer code.

Just a note: Hobby Lobby is in no manner hiring people based on their conduct outside of the workplace. I have not read the contract stipulations, but that is not really the issue. The issue rests in my view, on whether a company should have to pay to support certain conduct.

Weddings are a cultural and often a spiritual event — and almost by definition are loaded with ideological expectations that anyone so disposed is free not to participate in.

What’s interesting is how these people had crossed paths many times during the development of the computer. Alonzo Church was Turing’s Doctoral Advisor, while Turing and Von Neumann knew each other from Cambridge and Princeton.

Meanwhile Konrad Zuse was off by himself in Germany and patented the stored program computer in 1936! He also built the first Turing complete machine in 1941, but his achievement was deemed “strategically unimportant” by the German government. The allies dodged a bullet with that one.

“Unless I’m mistaken, you believe that there is nothing wrong with two people of the same gender having sexual relations with each other.” -RD

I don’t recall ever having said that. I believe that Christian marriage, as a religious institution, is a union between a man and a woman. Further, I believe that Christians should generally abstain from sex outside of a Christian marriage.

I couldn’t care less about how non-Christians or apostate Christians elect to conduct their sex lives, so long as they do not harm someone else without the other person’s consent. In that sense, the propriety of civil same-sex marriage ought to be evaluated with exclusive reference to cost-benefit analysis.

There have been at least three arguments in favor of sanctioning Eich: Anti-gay intolerance is a special type that cannot be accepted. A CEO is different than a mere employee. Conservatives are being hypocritical since they go after gays, so reversal is fair play. I reject those arguments.

Donating to political causes or candidates should be considered a private activity (as an extension of the secret ballot) and not be used to target anybody.

Regarding money in politics, it’s good that we allow the public to know where it’s coming from so that people can make a judgement about the candidate or proposition, but we should not use that information to punish the donor who would be protected with a “veil of ignorance”.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote: “whatever you think of gay marriage, the general practice of punishing people in business for bygone political donations is most likely to entrench powerful interests and weaken the ability of the powerless to challenge the status quo.”

That’s true, as we will no doubt start to read stories about companies scouring the donation lists to candidates and firing as they feel is appropriate.

Some anti-Eich commenters have said he could get a pass if he made a public confession of his errors. That gives you a taste of where some of his opponents are coming from.